The Kindness of Apollo
by l33 Destroyer of Worlds
Summary: Cassandra, and how she got this way. Warning for anyone offended by swearing, possibly-gory imagery, and heavily implied sexual activity: Contains all of the above.
1. Chapter 1

I remember him in gold.

When I was a girl, my hair was such a rich gold, and my skin so pale, that my father said I looked like a chryselephantine statue with great, dark eyes. Perhaps I now look so; I no longer know what I look like, or whether I am visible. I think we are all invisible to the Achaeans, now that they have conquered. They load their ships with our women, our weapons, our belongings and our pieces of home, our gold.

He glittered that day in the temple, when I was no more than sixteen. I did not hear him come in at first; I was sweeping. It was sunrise, and outside the light would have been golden and turned the sea into a sparkling array of a thousand lights, so that we could not look at it; but I was inside, and the candles shone off a thousand dedications and trophies and statues. I saw him reflected in the shield as he came behind me.

"You're up early, Princess Cassandra," he said.

At first I did not recognize him; he had taken the form of a mortal man, albeit uncommonly beautiful; his dark hair was caught in an athlete's knot, and his dark eyes were so liquid that I drowned in them and sank. "My lord," I said, "I have duties to the god."

He laughed, then, a deep, beautiful sound, like the ringing of a bell. "He is pleased, then."

"That's not for me to say, my lord." But in my heart, I liked to think that it was so.

"Modest, too. But I assure you, Cassandra, it _is_ for _me_ to say." I turned to face him, and saw, then, something faint and hard, hidden in those dark eyes; I was afraid, but put it out of my mind. When his hand rested on the bow he carried, I recognized him then, and I sank to my knees.

"You may kill me if you like," I whispered, my hand trembling as I reached for the hem of his chiton.

He frowned. "And why would I want to do that? In any case, it doesn't suit you to kneel at my feet like a suppliant." (But are we not all suppliants before the Gods?) "Get up." I did not move; I dared not move. "Cassandra. _Get up_, or I shall be angry."

I found my legs, then, and got up; weak and trembling, overwhelmed, I leaned against him, and he put his arm around me. "You have nothing to fear, if you are a good girl and do as I say. I have great plans for you."

After that, he came to me often. Not always as overtly as he had done that day; sometimes I would hear his voice as I walked the streets, coming to me in some snatch of half-overheard conversation. It was not unusual to see crows or tame house-snakes, especially given that so many of us were priestesses, but now I seemed to see them more than ever, and every so often I would find mice in my room where I could have sworn that there were none before. Once, at sunrise, I even saw a wolf which must have gotten into the palace at night; when I approached in fear and trembling, it did not attack me, but only looked at me gravely before padding off.

There seemed a thousand secret messages for me everywhere. When I read, the words almost glittered, luminous and set in gold; the wind in the laurels carried messages that I could not quite hear. When I visited the Thymbraean temple with my brothers, the sun swelled bright and heavy on my entrance. Knowing myself beloved of the god, I ran my mind often along our shared secrets, sweet as a piece of honeycomb on the tongue.

He courted me assiduously all that summer; I did not yet know the fate that befalls a woman who gives herself up, body and soul, to a god. He wanted me beautiful, temperate, rational, and I became these things, and knew myself beautiful because he loved me. My mother and sisters remarked on the changes in me, but none of them seemed able to figure it out.

I was to walk, that summer, in the procession to Athene with my mother and sisters and sisters-in-law, all the great joyous rabble of my noble family as it was before the war. Of course the importance of the festival did not escape me; since becoming a priestess, I had become more religious (and, had I but known it, a bit worse than a thorough bore). But I was not as free of earthly vanity as I am now, and I could not settle on a dress to wear, nor on what exactly I ought to look like; I said to myself that it was to honor Athene, but I wanted, too, to draw her brother's notice.

When I picked up my mirror, the bronze disc shone suddenly as bright as the sun, and although I could not see him, I knew that he was there. "Not that one," I heard him say, and felt his touch like a crow's feather against the azure of my peplos. "Wear white; it will never suit you better than tonight."

Chaste and pure, I walked in the procession when we took the robe to Athene in the temple. After I came back, I lay, first hesitantly and then eagerly, with the god in the narrow confines of my bed.

He opened my mind as well as my body; I saw words, strange curved letters like the Phoenicians' that I could make no sense of, and was transported worlds away. I saw the Fates' skein unwinding before me and could make perfect sense of it; in his arms, nothing was unknown to me, nothing denied. The taste of laurel leaves filled my mouth; an odor I did not recognize filled my nostrils, and I babbled ecstatically.

After, we lay still, my heart thumping like a frantic, captured sparrow in my chest. He stroked my hair from my forehead and bent to press his lips there; they burnt like divine fire, and I felt myself seared, all the impurity in me washed away. "Tell me," he said, "what you would like for a love-gift."

Would that he had never asked; would that I had never answered.

"Oh," I whispered, my hand resting on his shoulder, "only kiss me again, and I shall be happy."

"I shall do more," he murmured in my ear, and when his lips found mine again, I heard the twanging again of a harp, the whirr and thud of an arrow's flight, the howling of wolves. Nothing, I knew, would be the same again. "Now," he whispered, "when you go to divine, everything you say will come to pass, and they will know you for my own."


	2. Chapter 2

He had had what he wanted from me, though not in the manner of a mortal man, and after that, our meetings grew less frequent; yet the messages never quite stopped, though they grew fewer and farther between. Sometimes, at sunrise, he still came to me when the light flooded my chamber, and sometimes I felt him when I thought myself quite alone, though I did not see him.

Droplets of gold fell from my lips; everything that I foretold came to pass, and as he had promised, they knew me for his. When the peasants made the slow, laborious journey from the slopes of Ida, they would not ask another priestess to answer their questions; they wanted only me. My brother Helenus frowned, not sure what all this portended, though I think he guessed; certainly he knew more than he let on. My father sought my counsel, and I gave him the best that I knew how, though I would be remiss if I did not say that it did, after all, turn my head a little. (What were his other daughters, after all? Only a clucking henhouse.)

I could do no wrong; I could say nothing that was not true, that was not ineffably fated to come true. But even the gods are subject to fate.

Our situation with the Achaeans had always been precarious, starting even before I was born; my father was a boy the first time they had sacked the city, and my aunt had had to ransom him back, so that there would still be a Troy, and a king to rule it. We were still wealthy, in those final years before the war, and while we lacked for nothing, a good ally is beyond price. My father sent overtures to every king whose name he knew, and to some he didn't; this was how we obtained the alliance, not with Penthesilea, but with her predecessor.

Walking on the terrace in the warm weather, my father asked me whether he thought the Tyrians would be receptive to the treaty he proposed; I saw, in my mind's eye, a flash of purple, and smelled the sacrificial fires. I quivered, as if hung on a string between heaven and earth, and waited: I knew that the god would speak to me shortly.

I wished, later, that he had been silent.

"No," I said, relaying the answer. "I don't think they will. They like their ease too well, and they won't want trouble with the Achaeans." We did not know, then, that there would be another war; it was too far off, not even the faintest rumbling of thunder.

My father laughed; he was already old then, quite stout, and grey-haired, but his eyes were kind and blue. "What have the Achaeans to do with it? We have more money than they do, and unified leadership on top of that. I don't believe they've _ever_ decided who to follow, or that they ever will. No, my dear, whatever happens, I don't believe we have a thing to fear from the Achaeans."

And because I did not know better, and no further insight came to me then, I nodded and laughed, and said yes, I supposed I might be mistaken.

Even so I betrayed him; even so the harper plucks one string on the lyre, and the sound hangs in the air after he takes his hand away.

He forgave me for that time, but told me that the next time, he would not be so gracious. I wept, and promised that there would be no second time. (It seems to me, now, that I wept often in those days. Perhaps it is because I am as dry as the grave now.) And so the seasons turned, and I prophesied as clearly and beautifully and truthfully as I could, and clear as a bell the god spoke through me.

Another god spoke through the stranger.

When Helenus and I were about a year or two old, Mother had been confined for another baby, but there was no feast afterwards, and we never saw him or spoke of him. The official story was that he had died, as babies will; no one had questioned it. I was too young to recall anything about it at the time, and Helenus' memory of the period was not much better.

The stranger was from Ida, where he came from a sheep-raising family, and he had lived there all his life. He had had some kind of strange experience, some time prior, and came to Troy as a result; he had left a wife or a sweetheart, rumor was unspecific as to which, in the country. When my father was hearing petitions one day, the stranger was in the queue, and when his turn came around, he claimed to be my father's son.

The story had the entire family in an uproar; Hector said to me privately that he thought the story so ludicrous that no one could possibly take it seriously, and Deiphobus opined that it was probably an extortion attempt of some sort. (Yes, hard though it is to believe now, we had money in those days.) My sisters clucked and chirped like a dove-house set all a-twitter. Mother suddenly became ill and had to take to her bed, and my father wandered the palace at all hours, unable to sleep.

The stranger, it seems, had provided some very convincing proof.

After midnight, my father summoned me, and told me the whole story: there _had_ after all been another baby, but he had not died, as we had been given to believe. Mother had had frightening dreams while she carried him, and the soothsayers had recommended that my parents cast him out, on the grounds that some unspeakable, and vague, horror would come to us if he were kept. They had done so, but the servant enlisted for the task was too kind to kill him, and instead gave him to a childless couple who lived near Ida. They had kept, apparently, the very wrappings in which Mother had bundled him; the stranger was about the right age; and, most damning of all, he looked like us. I would be shocked by the resemblance, later, when he came to meet us for the first time.

"I just wish I knew what to _do_, Cassie," my father said, and for the first time, he looked old and haggard to me. "I can't endanger the city, which the soothsayers said I would, but if he's my own child, of course I want him with us. I want him to have the life I gave all of you." My father, for all his faults, was a kind man at heart.

I would have given anything not to have that conversation with him. He wanted my advice, and I was loath to tell him the truth. I would have liked to see for him a rosy future, Paris just one more of a cluster of sons supporting my father in his old age and the city in its golden years, but no matter how I tried to force this vision, it did not come.

I saw instead fire everywhere, scorching even the foundation-bricks where houses no longer stood. Flames lapped even in the temples, approaching the sanctuaries of the gods, and took the sacred images and all the trophies and dedications with them. Outside the city gates, I heard the clash of spear and sword on shield, and the war-chant of an alien people. Troy was on fire, a burnt-offering to the gods.

The words came very slowly from my mouth, and my lips felt numb and cold, as though they were not my own; I had the sensation, almost, that I was trying to speak through a corpse's mouth. "If you would not endanger the city," I said, "you must order him back to Ida. There let him live in obscurity all his days." When I shut my eyes, and smelled the familiar laurel under my nose, this seemed to me a safe course of action—I had the imprimatur of the god.

My father looked as if he had been slapped. "Cassie, how could you? He's your own brother! Would you really shut him out?" He tilted his head, his mouth puckering in that kind, wry smile that he used to give us as children after we were done being punished, and said, "Come here and put your arms around me, and tell me that you'd never do such a thing."

And so the first strand was woven. We did not know of the other strands that the Fates pulled slowly together, knotting and spinning, in Achaia and on Olympus.

At first, it was innocent enough. The stranger accepted my father's invitation to call on us at home, and we had him to dinner. He was a wide-eyed country boy; I had hoped, even at this late date, that he might prove to be an impostor, but when I set eyes on him for the first time, I knew that he was one of ours. I could barely eat at all, let alone carry on a civil conversation with my new brother; I would later find that he thought me snobbish, an opinion that would not change until Apollo had his vengeance.

I trembled at the table, watching my happy family welcome him home.

I trembled in my bed, almost crushed in the god's embrace.

I trembled in my heart, knowing what would be, and wondering how I might yet thwart the prophecy.


	3. Chapter 3

"I don't suppose," I said tentatively to Deiphobus, "that you might arrange an accident." I knew already that Hector would never do it; he was altogether too scrupulous. My other brothers were too rash, or too untutored, or too young; Deiphobus possessed a certain moral laxity, which ordinarily I would have found intolerable.

He studied me for a few moments, dark eyes glimmering in a tanned face, and then said, "What kind?"

I paused, closed my eyes, and listened; no answer came. "A fatal one," I finally murmured, and felt my face heat; how impious of me, to double-cross Zeus so and do away with a man who was both guest-friend and brother.

"Step into the shade," Deiphobus said; we had gone strolling in the courtyard together, in the heat of the afternoon, when we knew everyone else would be asleep. I did so, and he said, "Now, then. What do you propose?"

"I don't know how such things are done," I said, fidgeting with my peplos. "I suppose—I thought you might arrange for someone to wrestle him, or for a hunting accident, or maybe knock the pins out of his chariot wheels and replace them with wax."

Deiphobus grunted. "He's not much of a charioteer."

"You know what I mean," I said.

"We'd have to kill the man who committed it afterwards," my brother said, stroking his chin; for a moment, I lost myself in the flash of his rings against the black curls of his beard.

"I don't see why," I said. "The law doesn't require blood if it's an accident."

"Cassandra, you _ass_," Deiphobus said, glaring at me. "He'd _have_ to be killed. Don't you see? _He could never tell._"

I swallowed my bile, and began now to feel ashamed of myself; for a moment, looking into my brother's eyes, I thought I saw instead the stern, implacable face of Zeus, and shuddered. "Never mind," I whispered, and although it was a hot day, I felt as cold as ice. "Never mind. I cannot bear to have innocent blood on my head. For my part, I shall forget we ever had this conversation, and do you do likewise."

"As you wish," Deiphobus said.

I felt his eyes on my back all the way indoors.

Paris' blood was not innocent. He had been humble and unassuming enough when he first came to Troy, and thus at least tolerable if one had to spend any length of time with him. As his stay lengthened, he began to put on airs, until slowly he became indistinguishable from the masses of young noblemen who hung about the palace, becoming courtiers, flirting with my sisters, engaging in petty intrigues and admiring their own insipid cleverness. Even my younger brothers, who idolized him, began to find him a little tiresome, and more than once, I caught Hector shaking his head after passing Paris in the halls or on the street.

Later, when I went to help Andromache with the spinning, she told me that when Hector asked how Paris' lady friend was, he had said, "Oh, there's no need to bother with _her_."

Already he was aiming too high. I have always regretted not asking the Archer to strike him down right then and there, but my estranged lover has had his vengeance now.

"Let me go to Sparta," Paris said. "I've never been to Achaea." Neither had the rest of us, for that matter. It was one thing for us girls, who were no more going to be allowed to visit Achaea than to visit the Moon, but there was a great deal of discontent and mumbling among my younger brothers.

"I was thinking I'd send Antenor," my father said, "with Hector to help him. You can go in their entourage, if you'd like." The shine wasn't quite off Paris yet, though it pleased me to note that our father was not such a fool as to allow Paris to handle any negotiations. Father had put out feelers, and had received a letter from King Menelaus saying, in essence, _Yes, I might be interested in allying with you. Why don't you send an ambassador and we'll talk?_

In those days, we knew nothing of Menelaus' character, and didn't realize that there was an important statement he had neglected to include: _Of course, I'll have to ask my brother and see what he says._

"Forget Antenor," Paris said, with a smile that I supposed was to be seen as charming. In reality, he reminded me of an ox salesman I had once had to endure when Helenus and I were selecting sacrificial animals. "Send Hector, and me to help him."

"Help him fuck up, more likely," Deiphobus muttered into his wine.

"What was that?" Father said, looking right at us.

"Would someone please pass the figs up this way?" Deiphobus said, looking every bit as smarmy as Paris.

Appeased, my father said to Paris, "You know, that's not a bad idea. Hector will have to learn statecraft without Antenor, after all; he's as old as I am myself. And it wouldn't hurt you to—"

I do not know what he said next, for I never heard it. My vision was clouded, and I felt thick, acrid smoke stinging my eyes and clogging my throat; my legs ached, as if I had been running all afternoon. All around us, the banquet hall was crackling, on fire, and some sort of monstrous wooden totem was just barely visible from my vantage point. I could hear screams and the clash of sword and shield, the clank of bronze armor—

I jumped to my feet, shivering. "No!"

"Cassie!" my father said. "What in the name of Zeus—"

"No! Father, you can't allow it. You can't let him go!"

"Whyever not?" My father still listened to me, occasionally, in those days. "Have you had a vision?"

I nodded vigorously. "If you let him go, he will bring destruction back with him. We will fall. We will _all_ fall. Troy will be annihilated. Your sons will die, one by one. Your daughters and wife will be sold into slavery in Achaia." I remember, at this point, reaching for Father, wanting to shake him, wanting to make him understand what I had seen. "Father. No good will come back from Achaia with Paris. I can see only suffering and misery."

"Oh, don't listen to _her_!" Paris cried. "She's spoken against me ever since I first set foot in Troy. I don't know what I ever did to her, or what her deal is, but—"

"I am merely a conduit for the god," I said. "It is not _I_ who speak against you."

"How convenient," Paris sneered, "that the god's agenda matches your own."

"Paris," my father said, and his voice was quiet and stern. "I will have no blasphemy. Have a care, and remember that she is your sister."

I was heartened, then. "As I said: no one speaks against you, neither I nor Apollo. I say only that _if_ Father sends you, _then_ it will come to pass as I have foretold."

"You think too much of yourself for a woman," my brother fired back.

"Enough!" Mother said, rising to her feet. In those days, although she was no longer young, she was still majestic, and ordinarily one look from her would have been enough to stop us in our tracks.

Would that either of us had listened.

"I am only—" I began.

"Yes, yes, the servant of Apollo," Paris said, rolling his eyes and waving a hand airily. "We know. Funny, isn't it, how Helenus is also the servant of Apollo, and yet I've _never_ heard one _word_ of doom and gloom from his mouth."

"Cassandra's is the stronger gift," Helenus said. He believed that in those days; perhaps it was true. "She is more favored than I; it pleases the god that it should be so."

"Yes, I'll just bet it does," Paris shot back.

"Paris," Father said again. "Enough. We ignore her at our peril."

I was too far gone, too desperate, and overreached myself. "Look. These are your _brothers_, and mine—our own flesh and blood. If you go, they will die. Hector will die. Deiphobus will die. Lykaon will die. Polites will die. Polydoros will die." I pointed to each of them in turn. "And they will die because you cannot heed a warning. Take care, Paris—would you have a kinsman's blood on your head?" I recall that Deiphobus gave me a very interesting look just then.

"Cassandra!" Hector's hand clasped my wrist. "Sit down and eat. We'll talk about this after dinner. But for now, peace."

"Peace, you say?" I whispered, feeling the first icy fingers of horror at the back of my neck. "I wish it were so."


	4. Chapter 4

I did not sleep that night, and to calm my rattled nerves, walked ceaselessly up and down the silent corridors of the women's quarters; it must have been around midnight when Father found me. We stood, silently, at one of the windows for what seemed like forever; I could feel his discomfort, and I dare say he could feel my upset. Finally, he said, "I've decided to send Paris."

"Father, you didn't," I whispered, though I was so weary, and so resigned—almost as if I had _known_ that he would—that the news came almost as a relief.

"He wore me down, Cass. And it is an honor, and one I want to give him."

"Deiphobus would have been a better choice," I said. "It seems to me that Paris has had too much of honor lately. Are we to gratify his vanity by our shame?"

"Cassie. Enough."

"I'm sorry," I said. "But, Father, I can't lie. I _did_ see what would happen. I only got so out of hand because of it."

"We may yet thwart the prophecy," my father said, and he looked weary; in the moonlight, I realized for the first time that he was an old man. "Go to bed, Cassie. We'll talk in the morning."

I did not sleep that night, alone in my cold bed, waiting for dawn and half-hoping that it would never come.

He came to me just before dawn, there in my lonely chamber; I wished with all my heart that he had been only a mortal man, someone I could draw to me and beg for comfort, someone to share my burden. I wished that I had never been gifted so terribly, that I might not be so set against my own family, my own flesh and blood…

"You scorn my gift, Cassandra," he said, and although his eyes were dark, they blazed so terribly that I was afraid to look directly on him.

"No, lord, not I," I whispered, cowering and covering my head with the bedsheet.

"You're already an ingrate. Don't be a liar, too."

"I don't _scorn_ it, exactly," I said, trying to equivocate, entertaining for a minute the glorious delusion that I could trick a god. "I was just thinking—"

"That your life would be infinitely better if only you didn't know what was going to happen next and people didn't keep asking you. Is that what you were thinking?"

As if he really had to ask.

"Very well. Let no one say that I have been ungenerous to you. You may as well have what you want." I waited; there was, surely, a catch. "I assure you, Cassandra, nobody will ever ask you what is going to happen again, because nothing you prophesy will ever again be credible. In plain language, _no one will believe you_."

"My lord!" I reached, desperately, for the hem of his chiton; he pulled me close, the fingers of his man's form digging into my shoulders. I thought that he might still forgive me when his lips parted over mine, but when he spat into my mouth, I could no longer lie—not even to myself.

"I warned you, Cassandra," he said hollowly as he faded into invisibility.

I became dull and listless; even things like rising from bed or bathing seemed to require tremendous effort, which I simply was not prepared to exert, so I shirked them. I no longer went to the temples, or sat for hours in my mother's quarters, or indeed went anywhere; I stayed in my room, nursing my splendid unhappiness.

Mother made me come out when Paris came home, bringing disaster with him; I shrieked and struggled, trying to tell her what we could expect now, but all she said was, "Don't be silly, Cassandra. Your father would hardly have sent Paris on such an important mission if he couldn't do the job. Now hold still—your hair is filthy. By Hera, it'll take forever to get you shipshape."

Whatever his other flaws, Apollo is not a liar.

I stood in Helen's receiving line, feeling my blood turn to ice; my sisters gasped and smiled, admiring and envious at once. She must have been quite beautiful; at least, that is what I have always been told. I have never gazed upon her true form myself (or perhaps I _did_ gaze upon her true form, and no one knew it but my jilted lover and I). This is what I remember, only this: Creusa said, "This is my younger sister, Cassandra," and led me forward. And Paris led her forward, and she lifted her veil.

No one had told me what I would see: the grinning rictus of a corpse, bloated and greening in the hot Dardan sun, with the maggots already clustering in eyes and mouth. I screamed and jumped back, and longed to faint; my sisters caught me, and I remember hearing her say, "Is she all right? Paris, is she all right? Did I frighten her?" I laced my fingers together before my eyes, turned away from her.

At other times, unfortunately for me, I was quite sane.

"What," my father said later, when the slaves were cleaning the hall and the festival garlands had been taken down, "was _that_ disgraceful exhibition about? I know you were against sending Paris from the beginning, and I suppose you were right that he'd only get himself into trouble, but nonetheless, Helen is our _guest_ here. You had no cause to call attention to yourself and insult her in such an outrageous manner. I thought better of you, Cassandra."

"I'm sorry, Father," I whispered, and my tongue seemed tremendously bloated in my mouth. I could hear my own fate creeping up on me. "I…Apollo showed something when she lifted her veil, and—"

I was not allowed to finish.

My gentle father struck me so hard that I staggered backwards, clutching my cheek. "The next time you decide to stir up trouble, don't use the god to do it!" He signaled the slaves. "Take her away. Lock her up, and don't let me see her again for at least a sennight."

I was imprisoned in the women's quarters, within sight of the sanctuary of Thymbraean Apollo: holy of holies, irony of ironies. The clash of sword and shield reached me daily, though no prayers reached the gods, for none could help our need. Apollo visited me then, as now he visits me still, sometimes, and we consoled each other (can one console a god?), as we watched our city—the city of his toil, and of my birth—on its slow slide to destruction.

On some days, watching them battle in front of the Scaean Gates themselves, watching as my chamber faded slowly into a tomb, I felt an awful stillness, a terrible pride.

Alone of all Priam's daughters, I have had the honor of being ruined by a god.


End file.
